If you started the week frustrated by technical difficulties ensnaring several of your favourite services, prepare for more troubles ahead.
Experts say our reliance on digital services and cloud computing mean incidents like the major outage that hit Amazon Web Services in the early hours of Monday are bound to become more common.
"It's not the first time and it won't be the last time," said Paul Vallée, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and founder of Ottawa-based cybersecurity business Tehama.
He and others in the world of cybersecurity feel that way because cloud computing systems and other infrastructure providers are connected to so many prominent services people use and they are "inherently vulnerable" to bugs.
"I'm expecting this not to be, by any stretch, the last such problem," Vallée said.
His remarks came hours after Amazon Web Services reported troubles in the middle of the night with operations in northern Virginia, which affected its US-East-1 region.
AWS is a cloud computing platform companies use to operate websites, programs and other services so they don't have to build their own servers and physical infrastructure.
Because the service is used by a slew of big-name businesses, many had trouble operating their websites, processing transactions and assisting customers.
Financial services provider Wealthsimple and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase confirmed to The Canadian Press that they were among the many companies affected by the AWS outage.
While AWS continued to report issues well into Monday afternoon before the outage was resolved that evening, Wealthsimple and Coinbase said their services had largely recovered much earlier in the day.
"Clients may experience minor technical issues today as a result of the AWS outage," Wealthsimple spokesperson Juanita Lee said in an email.
The Toronto Blue Jays said Monday afternoon that Ticketmaster was experiencing "ticket management issues" because of the AWS outage. While the baseball team later said the issues were being resolved, they told fans they'd have extra staff at the Rogers Centre gates that evening to help guests having trouble with tickets access the venue.
Meanwhile, DownDetector, a popular website for tracking outages, saw an increase in users reporting issues with Fortnite, Snapchat, Pinterest and Instacart, among other sites, at around the same time as the AWS outage.
"It's totally chaotic when people and businesses wake up to a day that they thought would be normal and they're greeted with not being able to access systems or not being able to respond to customers," said Tola Jimoh, founder of Cyber Strategy Consulting, a Calgary-based business.
Some probably initially panicked as they tried to work out the source of the problem and rule out a cyberattack as being the culprit, she said.
But once they realized it was AWS to blame, many were pretty helpless.
"If AWS is your sole provider and your service is one of those that is impacted, you probably will have to wait it out," she said.
That was Tahir Janmohamed's experience.
In Las Vegas for a conference, he awoke at 2 a.m. to prepare the website of his Toronto-based company ManagingLife to launch an artificial intelligence-powered psychology support tool called Solace.
When he hit the button to make his website changes go live, it failed. He repeated the process again before contacting a colleague who told him AWS was experiencing technical difficulties.
The issues caused ManagingLife to delay the launch of Solace by a few hours while it waited for AWS to resolve the problem.
While the delay was frustrating, it didn't have Janmohamed thinking twice about AWS because "technical issues happen all the time" and the service is "infinitely better than if we tried to do it ourselves."
"You just have to roll with the punches. That's the life of a startup," he said.
Scenarios like this one are why Jimoh advises clients to diversify the companies they rely on for infrastructure and expect more interruptions ahead.
"Unfortunately, as much as I would want to make everyone happy and say we may not see this again, that's not going to happen," Jimoh said.
"We anticipate that this can reoccur — hopefully, not very frequently — but to say that it will not happen again, would actually be incorrect."
